1. Creating New Futures: Thinking Differently to Build a Better World
Katie Strom & Ardella Dailey
CSUEB Educational Leadership
for Social Justice EdD Program

2. A Different Way of Thinking
To address the massive injustices in our schools/communities and larger societies, we need to be accountable to our realities.
However, the way we think (dominant thinking patterns) limit us in terms of actually creating a more just world.
We need to develop more complex, interconnected, dynamic ways of thinking so we can become- otherwise.

3. Presentation Overview
Overview of dominant thinking and posthuman/rhizomatic thinking
Putting theory to work: The parable of the three scholar- practitioners
Exploring 3 key shifts in thinking: partner reading and dialogue activity

4. Arborescent or Tree Thinking: “The oldest & weariest type of thought” (Deleuze & Guattari)
“Arborescent” thinking (“Common sense”)
Essentialized, universal
Hierarchical, linear
Dichotomous/binary, either/or
Fixed, static
Reproduces itself
Closes off different thinking; Reinforces the status quo
Creates a sense of false objectivity, transcendence- “the voice from everywhere and nowhere”
Eurocentric Thinking

5. Thinking Differently: From the tree to rhizome
Posthuman, rhizomatic, or vital materialist thinking
Consists of many heterogeneous elements, connected at many different points
Each connection produces an expansion or differentiation
Everything is all together (but different)
Decentered
Constantly changing; vital
Opens up new, previously un- thought or unimagined possibilities

6. The Parable of the Three Scholar-Practitioners
There once were three scholar-practitioners who all were in their last year of an EdD program. They were also all interested in the same problem: disparities in academic achievement between students of color and their White peers. However, they all designed very different studies that constructed very different knowledge.
At your tables, divide up the 3 readings as equally as possible.
Read your narrative, and then work with a partner (or trio) who read the same one to answer the questions on the back.
Share out and discuss across stories.

7. A Research Assemblage
Research as collectively produced by an assemblage
Distributed agency
Human and non-human
Mapping out interactions, influences, power relations

8. We are arguing for a different type of worldview with significant shifts:
From dualism (separation) to monism (all together, but different)
From isolated, autonomous (human) individuals to multiplicities or assemblages of human- nonhuman elements with distributed agency
From objective, neutral, universal  to accountable, political, situated

9. Key Shifts for Thinking Differently
Read the three paragraphs describing these key shifts.
If you have a good handle on the ideas, move on to the questions and answer at least one.
Work with your program team if you are near each other.
After reading, if you need more time to dialogue and discuss the concepts themselves, find a partner at your table or nearby.
What are your key takeaways? What do you still have questions about?
Share out at your table.

10. Entrypoints for thinking differently
This way of thinking entails some radical shifts
But there ARE entrypoints from common practices in CPED
Action research, participatory forms of research
Autoethnography and intimate scholarship
Social Constructivist and sociocultural forms of learning
“Practitioner-scholar”

11. Connections to Practice
Can help develop systems perspectives
Organizations as systems with multiple components that interact
Systems that perpetuate inequalities
A more nuanced view of self/identity
Developing value for difference, plurality of culture, language, knowledge/ways of knowing
Solidarity, critical mass, movement-building

12. Being Courageous, Strategic, and leveraging our privilege & connections
Attending to our situated power relations to be strategic about what we do
Fighting for change always comes with cost
What are we able to do in our contexts? Where do we have agency?
Those of us who are privileged- how can you leverage your privilege to be political?
Leveraging CPED as a space of possibilities for connections and expansions

13. Connecting and Expanding… Even Through Walls

14. Key References & Further Reading
Braidotti, R. (2013) The Posthuman. Polity.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway. Duke University Press.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. University of Minnesota Press.
Strom, K. (2015). Teaching as Assemblage. The Journal of Teacher Education, 66(4),
Strom, K. & Martin, A. (2017). Thinking with theory in an era of Trump. Issues in Teacher Education, 26(3), 3-22.

15. FILM SCREENING TONIGHT, 6PM